Sha'ar HaGai (Hebrew: שער הגיא‬) in Hebrew, or Bab al-Wad in Arabic (Hebrew: באב אל-ואד‬, Arabic: باب الواد‎ or باب الوادي), lit. Gate of the Valley in both languages, is a point on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, 23 km from Jerusalem, where the road begins to ascend through a deep valley flanked by steep rocky slopes, named in Arabic Wadi Ali.

Contents

The Jaffa–Jerusalem road was initially made accessible for wheeled vehicles by the Ottomans in 1867[1] and since then served as the main highway to Jerusalem, favoured over more topographically convenient routes such as Route 443, known since biblical times as the Ascent of Beth-Horon. The journey from Jaffa to Jerusalem was reduced, thanks to this upgrade, from three to two days and Bab al-Wad became the one place where travellers had to stop for the night. For this purpose, the Ottomans built there an inn or caravansary, used soon after, in 1869, the year of the inauguration of the Suez Canal, by travelling royalty taking a detour to Jerusalem such as Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary, the future British king Edward VII and the future German emperor Frederick III.[1] In 1898 it was used again by German emperor Wilhelm II and his wife Augusta Victoria.[citation needed] The largest bell for the church of the Augusta Victoria Foundation, initiated during the 1898 visit and built between 1907 and 1910, weighed six tonnes and required that the road be widened and paved.[2]

From mid-May 1948 on, the fort at Latrun, only two kilometres west of Bab al-Wad, was held by the very efficient, British-trained and commanded army of Transjordan, the Arab Legion. The Palmach's 10th (Harel) brigade under the command of Lt. Col. Yitzhak Rabin, future prime minister of Israel, managed to capture Bab al-Wad itself, but the road section west of it, controlled from Latrun, remained in Jordanian hands until 1967, cutting off this main access route to Jerusalem. In order to bypass the Arab-held bottleneck, the Israelis constructed the Burma Road, named after the famous World War IIroad into China. This very steep bypass road was in use during the first, crucial part of the war, being replaced after just six months by a longer but safer detour route.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when the Latrun area was captured by Israel, the main Tel Aviv–Jerusalem highway was once again constructed on the shortest route past Latrun and Sha'ar HaGai. Today's already four-lane wide Highway 1 is currently (2016) being widened due to increasing traffic, by further carving into the slopes of the Wadi Ali gorge.

To this day, the remains of armoured cars that belonged to Jewish convoys and were destroyed during the 1948 war are lining the route as a memorial to the war dead. Most of them were regular trucks with improvised armour made of two sheets of steel and a layer of wood in between, which led to them being called "sandwich cars".

In a park south of the main road is the Mahal Memorial Monument, which commemorates the ca. 4000 Jewish and non-Jewish military volunteers who came from abroad to help with the creation of the Jewish state in 1947–48, of whom 119 lost their lives during the war.[5]